


Your Sky All Hung With Jewels

by bigmoneygator



Series: Under Blue Moon [1]
Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Fluff, Gen, M/M, One Shot, POV Carlos (Welcome to Night Vale), Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-05
Updated: 2013-08-05
Packaged: 2017-12-22 11:55:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/912915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bigmoneygator/pseuds/bigmoneygator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Of all the lovely, shrouded mysteries of Night Vale, Cecil was Carlos’ favorite. Cecil was an enigma that he couldn’t even begin to unravel. There was, he reasoned, some sort of explanation for every strange thing in this town. Even if that explanation was intervention from the hooded figures, or demonic activity, or perhaps angelic influence. Cecil could not be explained by any of those things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Your Sky All Hung With Jewels

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Killing Moon" by Echo & The Bunnymen. Just a little treat for all you Night Valeans out there.
> 
> [now with a mix.](http://8tracks.com/isladelmar/under-blue-moon)

**1**

Sometimes the cans of Soda at Rico’s Pizza bled.

The first time this happened, Carlos wiped at his mouth, checking if his lip was cut. He looked at his reflection in the dark screen of his cell phone. It didn’t dawn on him that the can was the actual source until he noticed a gurgling noise coming from inside the open tab. Dark, syrupy blood bubbled up out of the can. Venous blood, he thought. Then he wondered why venous blood was coming out of his can of Pepsi. He surreptitiously glanced at the cans on the other tables in the dining room. All of them had started spontaneously bleeding.

Had Carlos been any newer to Night Vale, had he been even one week or one day fresher to this strange place, the soda stigmata incident would have set him running as fast as his legs could carry him in the opposite direction, arms flailing, shouting to the Heavens for help or salvation. As it was, he merely placed a napkin underneath the can to keep from making a mess and slid it to the center of the table. The other diners did more or less the same. Old woman Josie, however, continued to drink her Diet Slice as if nothing had happened.

“This just in, listeners,” Cecil’s velvet voice said over the radio in Carlos’ battered pickup truck. “It appears that soda cans in the greater downtown area have begun spontaneously bleeding. John Peters, you know, the farmer? He reports that his can of Doctor Thunder released a torrent of blood directly into his left eye. Whether this phenomenon is limited to generics is yet to be determined. More on this story as it unfolds.”

Of all the lovely, shrouded mysteries of Night Vale, Cecil was Carlos’ favorite. Cecil was an enigma that he couldn’t even begin to unravel. There was, he reasoned, some sort of explanation for every strange thing in this town. Even if that explanation was intervention from the hooded figures, or demonic activity, or perhaps angelic influence. Cecil could not be explained by any of those things. 

Carlos was secretly thrilled by it.

**2**

Cecil looked different every time Carlos saw him. It was not a trick of the light or of his cursedly myopic eyes. Cecil did not look the way he had the first time Carlos had met him upon their second meeting. By their fifth meeting, Carlos had given up trying to decide if there was a rhyme or reason to Cecil’s changing appearance, if there was a pattern. If perhaps it was only on Wednesdays that his eyes were purple and his hair was silver and his skin so skim-milk pale you could see the veins below, or if a full moon meant a complexion the color of coffee with cream and hazel eyes and thick reddish-black curls.

Carlos questioned everyone, asked them what Cecil looked like. 

“Tall,” Cactus June (or Jane or Judy, Carlos never caught it exactly) said. “With a very crooked nose.”

“He just sort of . . . exists,” Big Rico, of Big Rico’s pizza and bleeding soda can fame, said with a shrug. “Nice tie collection, though.”

Steve Carlsburg described Cecil as a handsome gentleman with kind eyes and a warm smile. He got a wistful look on his face when he talked about it. Carlos fought a thread of jealousy that snaked into his spinal column. He understood why Cecil hated smarmy, smug Steve Carlsburg the way he did, if only for just a second.

“Such a nice young man,” old woman Josie said as she knitted on a park bench by the currently cordoned off municipal garden. Shrieks and grunts emanated from the garden, but Josie just went about knitting. “He always helps me with my groceries.”

“But what does he look like?” Carlos pressed, getting a little desperate.

“Hmm.” Old woman Josie put down her knitting needles. “A bit like one of my angel friends. But far less great and terrifying.”

Carlos had never seen the angels, and so tried very hard not to tear his hair out with frustration at the vague and differing descriptions given to him by the various members of the Night Vale community. He decided the best course of action was to put it aside for the moment, go get a cup of coffee at the Moonlight All-Night Diner, and pretend to be interested in the experiments in his lab.

**3**

“I don’t think he listens to me, sometimes.”

Carlos is always listening. He never touches the dial on his old analog radio, purchased for five dollars at a junk sale in the trailer park on the outskirts of town. He endures hours of dead air and white noise, broadcasts of nothing but animals howling, dreadful accordion music, and the occasional low moan and ominous growling, to make sure that he never, ever misses Cecil’s show.

He pretends not to be hurt, a little, by Cecil’s half-whispered accusation.

**4**

Night Vale is constantly home to seismic activity that would make a normal town collapse. Carlos’ seismometer is always jumping, furiously scribbling down a frantic zig-zagging line denoting a 9.0 on the Richter scale. The kind of earthquake that assured destruction and death tolls larger than the entire town’s population. The kind of earthquake that would be felt in Desert Bluffs and beyond.

It puzzled Carlos. He pored over the readouts. He went out into the desert and planted probes, took his portable instruments and waited. When those failed to provide him with an explanation beyond unequivocable seismic activity in a desert that was completely still and silent, he laid with his ear to the ground. All he heard was a very faint humming.

He left his seismometer running all the time. The readings were normal sometimes. Most of the time, as a matter of fact. The strangeness of the high readings was contingent on their extraordinary level, rather than their near constant stasis at those levels. Carlos posited that perhaps demonic activity was to blame for this mystery.

**5**

Carlos’ Friday night ritual was to go to the Moonlight All-Night Diner and order the dinner special: meatloaf and mashed potatoes, with a side of steamed green beans and a slice of cornbread. Before coming to Night Vale, Carlos had been a vegetarian for most of his life. The Sheriff had accused him of witchcraft because he subsisted on kale and pinto beans and carbohydrates alone. He figured it was best if he just kept his head down and ate meatloaf like the rest of Night Vale’s esteemed citizens.

Cecil was in the diner one Friday night, sitting alone with a strawberry milkshake in front of him. Carlos begrudged, slightly, the fact that Cecil appeared to subsist on milkshakes and hard caramel candies and peppermint sticks, and no one said anything whatsoever about dark forces at work. He was reading an old copy of the Night Vale Daily Journal; very old, since the Journal had started running its imagination edition at least a month before.

Cecil was radiant. Carlos sat down on the other side of the diner to look at him without being noticed. His hair was blonde that day; not yellow blonde or brown blonde, but the color of a very good honey. Not at all like the stuff in the bear-shaped jar at the supermarket. More the color of the stuff that comes from Sicily and tastes like flowers. Carlos couldn’t make out the color of his eyes that day, or whether he had freckles on his nose and cheeks. Those were Carlos’ favorite days, freckled Cecil days. Occasionally he would take a pull of his milkshake and slide his thick-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses back up his nose when they threatened to fall off onto the newspaper.

Carlos picked at his food and tried not to stare. He didn’t have the nerve or the heart to say anything to Cecil, the man who called him beautiful and perfect over the radio for everyone to hear. He never did. What sort of terrible expectations might Cecil have heaped upon him? What kind of heart-shattering letdown would he be to Cecil when it was discovered that he never made his bed and was exceedingly grouchy on the weekends? When he failed spectacularly to live up to the wonderful, perfect Carlos that Cecil had crafted inside his head?

“Hello,” Cecil said, sneaking so silently up to Carlos’ table that he jumped and the mashed potatoes on his fork landed in his lap.

“H-hi,” Carlos stammered.

“I was wondering,” Cecil said, wrinkling his nose, “if you had the time.”

“Oh. Oh, yeah. Yes.” Carlos checked his watch. “Eight forty-two.”

“Thank you, Carlos,” Cecil replied. 

He turned to go, but not before Carlos noticed the electric blue of his eyes. The careless way his tie was tied on backwards. And the freckles! Oh, today, Cecil had freckles. The air seemed to vibrate around him as he left. Carlos realized that the air was literally humming just before Cecil left the diner.

When Carlos got home that night, the readings on his seismometer indicated that there had been another 8.5 on the Richter scale. The earthquake had apparently ripped through the town, hitting its peak at approximately 8:42 pm, before it died down just before Carlos had walked through his door.

The quiet hum that followed Cecil wherever he went seemed to have followed Carlos home. He felt it in his bones, vibrating like a heavy bass line in a club in his chest, making his teeth chatter.


End file.
